


Meeting His Maker

by non_canonical



Category: Being Human, Being Human (UK)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Gen, Injury, Language, Major Character Undeath, Orsha, The Battle of Orsha, a Muscovite lance, six illiterate whores
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-22
Updated: 2012-06-22
Packaged: 2017-11-08 08:14:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/441102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/non_canonical/pseuds/non_canonical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>September 1514: the Battle of Orsha.  Thirty thousand cavalry.  Five thousand infantry.  And one Englishman known as Henry of York.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meeting His Maker

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: _Being Human_ belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC.

There's a crow perched on an upturned helmet, considering Hal with glittering eyes.  It hops closer.  Hal clenches his jaw against the agony in his belly and he lifts one shaking hand.  The breath hisses through his teeth; his arm drops back into the mud, but it's enough.  The bird squawks and flaps away – but it doesn't go far.  The filthy things eat a man's face and hands, and they don't always wait until he's dead.  There's no lack of corpses, and Hal can only pray that it goes after easier meat.

Pray: he sobs out a laugh.  He tried praying when he first collapsed here, unable to drag himself one more painful foot towards the camp.  He raised his voice above the buzzing of the flies and the moans of the wounded, swallowed his pride and called out to a God he'd long since turned his back on.  Repented of his sins and begged to be saved, for someone to find him.  All he achieved was to shout himself hoarse.  He's not sure why the disappointment burns so badly: God turned his back on him a long time ago.

The sky is reddening towards sunset, and the shadows are lengthening across the living and the dead alike.  Nobody is going to find him, here on the edge of the forest.  Nobody is going to search this expanse of torn and battered bodies.  Not for him.  Panic thickens in his throat.  He doesn't want to die here, to be thrown into an unmarked grave.  Bastard, son of a whore – that's what you're called when you have no father to give you a surname.  Henry is the only name that truly belongs to him, and now he's going to lose that too.  He doesn't want to be sent nameless into the dark.

Hal shivers.  There's a fever slowly cooking his insides, but he's cold, too.  If he'd known how much he'd bleed, he'd never have wrenched the broken lance blade from the wound.  If he'd known that he'd be left here to rot, he'd have pushed the thing in deeper.  He's heard the stories of how a man can linger for days on the battlefield.  

A clattering of wings: the crow again.  Heading away from him, as though someone startled it, and Hal stretches his ears to catch the slightest noise.  There: footsteps stumbling across the churned ground.  And coming closer.  His heart thumps and the breath surges into his lungs – but he holds his tongue.  The dead are easy to rob; the wounded are easy to kill.  All that he truly values is in the little pouch around his neck.  It isn't gold or coin, nothing worth stealing, but his throat is liable to be cut for it, all the same.  His fingers inch towards the discarded lance, but the steel is heavy and he has no strength to lift it.  

Hal catches a blur of movement out of the corner of his eye and he forces his head up, straining to see – but, Jesus Christ, the pain.  He falls back with a strangled cry.  A man is looming over him, and Hal can't just lie there and wait for the cudgel or the knife.  But the man is on him before he can move, pressing him down into the wet earth.  There's nothing else that Hal can do so he tries to speak, but his tongue is swollen in his parched mouth, and all those awkward Polish words warp and melt inside his heated brain.

"Make it quick," Hal croaks.

The pressure eases, and the man sits back onto his heels.  Hal can't see his face inside the shadow of his hood – just a gleam of skin, a flash of teeth – but he can feel the weight of the man's gaze upon him.  

"You're a long way from home," the stranger says.

It's been a long time since Hal heard anyone speak his native tongue, and his eyes smart with unexpected tears.  He shouldn't be lying here among these foreign dead; he owes these people no allegiance.  Hal thinks of England, of York – and he scowls and blinks the tears away.  There's nothing for him back there, and the only home he ever knew is long since gone.

"What brought you here, I wonder?" the man says.  "What crime were you fleeing?"

The man's got it wrong: Hal isn't running away, he's searching.  For what, he's not quite sure, but he knows there's something better out there and he's going to find it.  He wants to be more than this.  But the further he travels, and the more he sees – the more he does, and maybe the stranger's not entirely wrong, after all – the further away it seems to get.

Hal licks his cracked lips and works a little moisture into his mouth.  "Help me," he says, "or get it over with."

"I'm a surgeon," the man tells him, and maybe God hasn't abandoned Hal after all.  This man is going to save him.  "I was searching for the wounded."

The surgeon finally pulls back his hood.  He's young, not much older that Hal, but he has the eyes of a man who's used to carving flesh and sawing bone.  The surgeon peers at the torn mess of Hal's clothing.  He peels the jerkin back, but the blood has clotted, gluing fabric to flesh, and the wound gapes wetly.  Hal shrieks, his heels digging into the ground, every muscle straining as his body tries to arch away from the pain – but that just makes things worse – and finally, finally the surgeon lets the wound slip closed.

"Leather is no protection against steel," the man remarks, while Hal lies limp and gasping.  As if Hal doesn't know that; as if he had a choice.  

Hal should never have stayed in Gdansk when his ship sailed; he should never have thrown in his lot with the Polish army.  A man on foot, with no armour, is easy prey for a mounted knight.  He should have run the night before the battle, but the Polacks had taken to hanging deserters, and he'd have fared no better if the Muscovites had caught him.  But it's turned out all right in the end.  He'll bear a scar, but he'll heal, he'll live.  And when he's well again things are going to be different.  He's going to be the one on horseback, the one giving the orders.

"You're going to die," the surgeon tells him.

There's relentless truth in the man's voice, but, now that he's heard it spoken, the hunger for life awakens painfully inside of Hal.  He opens his mouth to protest – he's young; he's strong; he'll be all right if the man will call for a cart or an assistant, if they'll take him back to the camp – but only a tortured breath wheezes out of his throat.

"This doesn't have to be the end."  The man smiles down at him, as though sharing a secret.  "What if I could promise you eternal life?"

And that's the final insult, to have his dying plagued by talk of God.  "Thought you were a surgeon," Hal spits, "not a priest."  

A cough rips through his chest, cutting him off.  He can taste blood.  Cold fingers grip his cheek, and Hal finds himself looking into the face of a fiend from hell, perhaps the very devil himself.  His body thrashes in one last, desperate struggle, but the fiend just holds him tighter.

"Do you want to live?" the thing asks, and Hal can't think of any reason why he wouldn't.  He isn't finished with this world yet.

"Yes," he whispers.  It's all that he can manage: he's cold, so very cold, and he can no longer move his legs.

"Even if there's a price?"

If the devil wants the shrivelled thing he calls his soul, it's a small enough price to pay.  And there's no one to talk him out of it; no one will even know.  Every breath is a battle now, so Hal jerks his head in a nod.

"Very well, then."

The fiend tears the shirt away from Hal's throat, but flinches, black eyes terrible in his contorted face.  A momentary sting as the cord snaps, then Hal's precious leather pouch rests in the monster's hand.

"Not a holy relic," the creature laughs, pulling out a lock of dull gold hair.  It's Rebecca's.  Out of the six, Hal always suspected that she was the one.  He'd studied himself in the mirror and thought that he could see her mouth, her smile.

Hal stares upwards in a silent plea, but the pale fingers open and the hair is snatched away by the breeze.  The fiend turns the pouch upside down and, one by one, they flutter out and are lost: Hannah, Alice, Maud and Jane.  Meg is the last.  Her hair catches on the creature's fingers, but he flicks his wrist and the chestnut curls are gone, a last flash of colour in the failing light.

"Whoever they were," the devil tells him, "they're nothing to you now."

They were the only ones who ever cared for him, the only ones who were kind, and this time Hal can't stop the tears.  They were the only ones who would have mourned him.

"Are you ready?" the creature asks, twisting his head to one side.  Hal can see nothing now except darkness, but at least he no longer has to look into those eyes.  "This is going to hurt."

It does, but it's soon over.  
 


End file.
